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Thursday, April 09, 2009

By George, he's got it!

It's not often I congratulate the Tory party on this blog, but this deserves a mention.

In a speech yesterday, Mr Osborne said: "We cannot allow one part of our economy to behave in a way that puts the rest of the economy at risk when it fails. We need to think deeply about whether we can sustain banks that are not only too big to fail, but potentially too big to bail.He added: "We should look at whether Britain in fact needs smaller banks."

This has always been one of my arguments against globalisation. Businesses - not only banks - complain that they need to get bigger to "compete" in the global economy, but instead of getting more choice we end up with virtual monopolies as acquisitions and mergers take place. The Office Of Fair Trading is now concerned about the lack of competition to such an extent that it is to launch a major inquiry into how consumers can be protected following the loss of competition in banking.

Global regulation will only make matters worse. It is far easier for large corporations to absorb the costs of regulation than it is for smaller companies. That makes smaller companies uncompetitive and unable to fend off acquisitions leading to less choice and more restrictive practices.

Not only that, but the large corporations have enormous lobbying power which they can utilise to form the regulation into something that suits them.

This can be avoided in the relatively small, national based economy - but globally it can not. If the Tories are serious about this they need to realise this simple basic fact - otherwise their "smaller banks" will simply be gobbled up by larger foreign banks at the first opportunity.